Barth’s Romans commentary is loaded with broadsides against the church’s domestication of the gospel, making it just another worldly commodity. Barth quotes Kierkegaard:
“Remove from the Christian Religion, as Christendom has done, its ability to shock, and Christianity . . . is altogether destroyed. It then becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them; by discovering an unreal and merely human compassion, it forgets the qualitative distinction between man and God” (pp. 98-99).